External hires use executive search. When hiring a leader from outside the studio, you now pick from three candidates with name, background, strength, culture fit, and a signing bonus instead of typing a name yourself.
Refresh candidates for a fee if none of the current options fit.
Promote from staff lists better-matched roles first (e.g. designers for Creative Lead), with a note when someone isn’t the usual fit.
Tab unlock is clearer. Leadership appears when you reach week 104 with 8+ staff. Before that, the screen shows your progress toward the unlock.
The Leadership tab no longer shows a “Coming soon” label.
Loyalty affects quits. Disgruntled staff are more likely to leave when morale stays critical; loyal staff are more likely to stay.
Easy difficulty reduces morale loss from project work; Hard increases it.
Stacking company-wide morale hits are capped (overcrowding, low cash runway, burnout fallout, etc.) so several penalties at once can’t drain morale as harshly in a single week.
Talk to staff can reset resignation risk if you bring someone back above critical morale. Talk cooldown is shorter when morale is very low.
Staff list shows estimated weekly morale change (+/− per week) and a quit risk countdown when morale has been critical for multiple weeks.
Staff profile shows a clearer warning when someone is close to quitting.
Relaxed HR (optional at game start): slower morale drain on projects, lower quit risk, and faster loyalty recovery. Morale still matters — this mode is less punishing, not turned off.
Staff loyalty
Loyalty is separate from morale. It now recovers when you look after people, not only when they hit a career goal.
Good morale helps loyalty — staff at 60+ or 80+ morale gain extra loyalty each week.
Idle time between projects — setting staff to Idle builds loyalty as well as morale.
Long-serving staff — tenure adds a small weekly loyalty bonus (2+ and 5+ years).
Talk — Praise and Reassure now give +2 loyalty (as well as morale).
Contract renewals — +3 loyalty when you renew a contract.
Crunch — still hurts loyalty, but less harshly than before (−1/week instead of −2).
Safety net — if morale is healthy (50+), loyalty won’t stay stuck at rock bottom; it floors at 15 until morale drops.
Staff profiles now show a weekly loyalty trend estimate and a tooltip explaining how loyalty works.
Career goals
Lead a team project (formerly easy to misread as “be project leader on Teams”) — completes when you’re on a medium or large project, when you’re team lead and your team is on one, or when you’re a company leader assigned to one.
Creative freedom — fixed: innovation slider 60+ now counts (was effectively unreachable).
Mentor someone — only counts juniors who are actively assigned, not idle on the same project.
Each staff profile shows the goal description and a checklist of what’s done and what’s still needed.
Existing saves
Load your save and advance a week, new rules apply automatically. In-progress goals may complete on the next tick if you already met the updated requirements. Loyalty values are kept; staff with good morale but very low loyalty should start recovering.
When you start a console game and choose a target console, exclusivity offers during development now come only from that console, not from every rival platform in the market.
If you already had a rival deal sitting in Studio Decisions, it should clear after you advance one week.
The Bidding war! banner on a platform deal now appears only when two or more platforms actually have pending offers for that game. A single offer no longer gets flagged as a bidding war just because Console Wars is active.
If you accept a timed or full exclusivity deal:
Your project is locked to that console for release.
You can’t release on a different platform and keep the advance.
Other pending offers for the same game are cleared when you sign.
Checking Console exclusive (no PC/mobile) at project creation now blocks PC and mobile ports after release, not just launch bonuses.
When creating or viewing a console project:
Your target console is shown more clearly.
A short note explains that platform deals during development will only come from the console you chose.
The exclusivity checkbox includes helper text so it’s obvious it means no PC/mobile, not “exclusive to this console by default.”
Fixed: After winning a bidding war and choosing Run as studio (keeping the acquired company as a separate label), switching back to your original studio could wrongly send you back to week 1 and ask you to set up your studio again (country, city, name, slogan), even though you were still a publisher with two studios and much of your progress still visible elsewhere.
Now: Your main studio keeps its correct week, name, staff, projects, and releases when you switch between studios after a merger.
Saves: If you load an older save that hasn’t hit this bug yet, your main studio data is refreshed on load so a future acquisition should work correctly. Saves that were already broken after switching back to main may not be fully recoverable, start from an earlier save if you have one.
Rivals could develop and release mobile games in the 1980s and 1990s while your studio still had Mobile locked with “Mobile from 2011.” That was inconsistent.
Competitors only target Mobile from 2011 onward, same as you.
Mobile ports (Reports, game record, etc.) are blocked until 2011 — no early workaround.
Existing saves: when you load a save on this patch, any rival project or release still tagged Mobile before 2011 is corrected to PC. Saves already in 2011+ are unchanged